On the Patriotism of Wright's Jeremiads and Michelle Obama's Pride

Recently, a newspaper reporter asked me to comment on the attitudes of African Americans toward Sen. Barack Obama's presidential candidacy. I told him I would share my thoughts on the understanding that I had not personally polled all 30 million of us. No doubt, he thought me tedious. But I think it is important, especially lately to note the particularities of our experience. As I struggle to do that, with the clumsy tools that English provides, I can understand why poet Audre Lorde used to identify herself with a string of adjectives, "As a black, lesbian, American-born woman of Caribbean descent..." I feel the need to begin this message with all sorts of contextualizing adjectives, lest my meaning be misconstrued.

I've been feeling skittish ever since Michelle Obama was vilified for saying that the enthusiasm of this year's political campaign had made her "really proud" of her country for the first time in her adult life. Then there was the mumbling about photos of Barack Obama standing at attention during the Pledge of Allegiance, (never mind that there are similar photos of former Pres. GW Bush). There were the difficult conversations about race and gender on BlogHer and elsewhere that stirred so much emotion.

And now, Obama has finally denounced quotations from sermons preached by Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. over the last several years. Specifically, he was called upon to repudiate comments Dr. Wright made about the role of US policy in instigating the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as comments in which Wright likened the contrast between Obama's personal background and social location and Hillary Clinton's to that of Jesus and the Romans.

I watched the controversies and noted the return of a familar unease. As i told fellow BlogHer CE Erin Kotecki-Vest, I was afraid to blog my feelings about all of this -- this torrent of emotion, memories, struggles that lead me to such a different understanding of what Wright and Michelle Obama said.

And will you understand? Will you care? Will you see me in my similarities to and my differences from you? Can I trust you? Will you trust me? Can we do this work together?

Let me start here. I am 51 years old. Like Michelle Obama who is seven years younger, I have working class roots, and I was privileged to graduate from Princeton. Like Michelle Obama, I wrote of feeling alienated during my time there. When she talked about feeling really proud of her country for the first time, I heard nothing offensive. The pride she expressed reminded me of the tears that fell involuntarily when I watched Obama's Iowa victory speech, and the delicious shock of walking into a voting booth Feb. 5 and seeing before me the most diverse array of candidates I have ever seen: a black man, a white woman, a Hispanic man, and a white man with working class roots who talked about poverty and the need for racial healing.

What surprised me was when I read comments like these from John Podhoretz:

Forget matters like the victory in the Cold War; how about only things that have made liberals proud — all the accomplishments of inclusion? How about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991? Or Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s elevation to the Supreme Court? Or Carol Moseley Braun’s election to the Senate in 1998? How about the merely humanitarian, like this country’s startling generosity to the victims of the tsunami? I’m sure commenters can think of hundreds more landmarks of this sort. Didn’t she even get a twinge from, say, the Olympics?

Like a foreigner still trying to learn the language of the locals, I found myself wondering what this pride was that I was supposed to feel? Understand me, I used to raise money for Soviet Jews, and I hoped the fall of the Berlin wall would advance freedom for the people of the former CIS states and reduce the threat of nuclear war, but it never occurred to me that this should be some occasion for jingoistic pride. I thought of that and other accomplishments of that time as a testament to the efforts of diverse coalitions of people, not all of whom were American.

I watched the clip from Dr. Wright's sermon on the Sunday after 9/11 and I heard a call to conscience. The language intemperate, but it was a call to conscience none the less. I was reminded that as far back as 1962, scholar-activist WEB Du Bois warned that if the West did not deal with its former colonies equitably as they became independent, they might find themselves targeted by terrorist attacks. It was a way of speaking truth to power that goes back to David Walker's Appeal and Frederick Douglass' sober reflection on the meaning of the Fourth of July for the slave.

I even recalled a sermon, "Paul's Letter to American Christians" of Dr. King's that inveighed against segregation, secularism and materialism, advising:

Therefore, your ultimate allegiance is not to the government, not to the state, not to nation, not to any man-made institution. The Christian owes his ultimate allegiance to God, and if any earthly institution conflicts with God's will it is your Christian duty to take a stand against it. You must never allow the transitory evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God.

And I wondered what litmus test am I failing? What outrage am I supposed to feel? What is this Americanism that is supposed to be so affronted?

And as the controversies spin on, I feel old WEB Du Bois on my shoulder,whispering as he did more than 100 years ago:

[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity...

The difference between that time in this, of course, is that people think we are in a 'post-racial" America, where race doesn't matter. Others, like former Rep. Geraldine Ferraro,would have you believe that when it comes to Barack Obama's success, race is all that matters. And still others, watch the "Unashamedly Black, Unapologetically Christian" services at Trinity United Church of Christ, would have you believe that there is something anti-American in this church. It is, to my mind, thoroughly grounded in the progressive wing of the black American church tradition, despite the fact that it is part of a predominantly white denomination, the United Church of Christ. (That last part seems lost on people who want to call the church "racist" or "separatist.")

I am a 51-year-old black American woman. I watch all of this and wonder whether this means that the time has not yet come for the veil to be rent.

Let me explain what I mean. I was born in 1957, the year that Federal troops enforced integration in Little Rock High School, Ghana got its independence, and the Soviet Union started the space race by launching the Sputnik satellite. By the time I was five years old, the rules of race and gender were thoroughly imprinted upon me. I remember the white men who owned the stores and collected our rent. I remember the adults talking about whether the government would let Negroes march on Washington, and whether it would matter. I remember the way the street cleared one Saturday afternoon because a colored boy was on American Bandstand. I attended segregated northern school until I was placed in a public school for gifted children in fourth grade.

My life has been a continual process of measuring myself against the Veil, calculating how far we could go in achieving that synthesis of which Du Bois wistfully wrote -- the merging of the African and the European heritages into a better, truer self. Could my family live in a house? with a lawn? Could my brother and my cousins make it to adulthood without becoming a statistic? Was it really possible that my father, son of sharecroppers and grandson of a slave, could get a degree and entree to a job that did not require him to endure being called a boy? Could my stepmother really see an end to having to smile while serving her employers, two white New Jersey college professors, as they entertained friends and talked about voting for Sen. Barry Goldwater "because he could keep the Negroes in their place?"

I could go on, and of course, in my lifetime, many barriers have fallen. Others have shape-shifted. I moved to a suburb to take advantage of the best school district in the region, but little did I realize there would be racial and sexual taunts from children that my daughter had known since kindergarten. I didn't know that I would go to a dinner at a professional conference in 2005, and the black women would find ourselves sharing tales of the "sundown towns" we'd inadvertently visited in recent years. One takes in the data, judges its seriousness, decides whether it is to be fought or avoided, and what tactics would serve either strategy.

And there are structural realities not so apparent in this recounting. There are the racial disparities in wealh that result partly from a lack of financial education for those of us who are newly middle class, partly from the fact that much of the land we once owned in the South was stolen or ceded, and many of us who are newly middle class are paying bills for our less-fortunate family members. There is the urgent, but largely ignored issue of the school to prison pipeline. And there are the other attendant social ills that plague the whole society, but are especially acute in communities with a limited tax base and a weak infrastructure.

Historically, the black churches, civic organizations and cultural institutions have been the places where we could figure out where we stood and what we should be doing. In high school, I needed the sympathetic touch of a black teacher, Mrs. Johnson when I read Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia" and learned that the man who said "all men are created equal" had this to say of me:

The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarfskin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oran-ootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious experimentalist has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more of it. They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.

Jefferson said those things in the time of my great-great-great grandfathers, but each fourth of July for the last several years, my son has donned a Revolutionary War uniform, picked up a fife and marched to commemorate the declaration that Jefferson and his contemporaries signed. When I watch him parade, of course I am proud of him. Of course I value the positive aspects of the legacy of the man whose words are being celebrated. But do you blame me if my joy is alloyed by the memory of his other words and deeds?

May I tell you a more hopeful story? In 1995, I was teaching a lesson on civil disobedience in an interdisciplinary humanities seminar. The students, all in their first year. Of course, they had read Henry David Thoreau's "On Civil Disobedience" and Dr. King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. We discussed how far one should go to protest unjust laws, and at the end of class, I asked for brief write-ups of what they'd learned, and what they had questions about.

An Indian American young man wrote of Mahatma Gandhi, a Jewish student wrote about the fact that his grandparents on both sides had lost all of their relatives in the Holocaust. A South African student, fresh off the experience of having been able to vote for the first time, wrote about the tension between the need to combat injustice and the need for order in a civil society. And one young woman wrote about the moral imperative of making the leaders of the Nazi regime pay for their crimes with their lives, despite the fact that she was a grandneice of one of the major figures of the Third Reich.

And I, a wheelchair-using great-granddaughter of slaves, was their teacher. I cried, and for the first time in my life, at 37 years old, I said to myself, "Only in America."

I was 40 years old the first time that I walked the streets of my hometown, Philadelphia, and felt respected by the police officers. And some of my closest relatives are police officers.

I was 44 years old on September 11, 2001, when terrorists struck New York and Washington. My first thought was, "Well, we're all Americans now."

And yes, seeing the broad support flowing to Barack Obama did make me think that maybe, just maybe, someone with the visible imprint of Africa on his face and body might be considered on his merits as a possible President. I realize now that my tears are partially tears of hope that this generation will find a way to rend the veil and fnally lay this burden down.

Related links:
Lone Sophist: Have We Made Any Progress at All?

Frank Schaeffer: Obama's Minister Committed "Treason" But When My Father Said the Same Thing, He Was a Republican Hero
cross-posted at Blogher